Volumnia

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Margot Leicester

This is Margot's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Other Shakespearean roles include Lady Macbeth in Macbeth and Gertrude in Hamlet. Margot has worked at many theatres – Soho Theatre, Hampstead Theatre and the Donmar Theatre to name a few. Margot also appears regularly on television, most recently in Messiah and Spooks.

Bulletin 1

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as she goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Becoming an actor
Most actors just say the same thing - they all wanted to be an actor from a very early age. They can’t think of it as a career move, they just decide ‘Oh I want to act’. However, when I was little, being a vet ran a close second to being an actor because I loved animals until I found out you had that to become a vet you had to go to university for 7 years and I thought ‘perhaps not’, as much as I loved horses.

I knew I wanted to act because I loved saying things out loud. I loved being in plays in school and things like that. What made me consider acting as a career was seeing Shakespeare for the first time at Stratford by the Royal Shakespeare Company when I was 14 on a school trip. I’m from Manchester and was from a girls school and we went down to Stratford for a week which seemed very formal really. The first play we went to see (and remember I was only 14!) was Timon of Athens with Paul Schofield in and I can remember writing in the programme ‘I have no idea what is plays about so if I come away enjoying it, it will be a true test of Shakespeare’ and it is a complete tribute to Paul Schofield and the RSC of 1963 or 64 that the production was as clear as day and totally extraordinary. We were riveted with Shakespeare and we loved it.

It was Shakespeare that tipped me into thinking that acting was what I want to do. In becoming an actor, I think the only concession my parents made was that I instead of going to drama school I should do an English and Drama degree at university which in that time (the late 1960s) there were just four universities in the whole country that did drama at all. What is interesting from an educational historical point of view is that the idea that drama was as an academic subject you could do degrees in was only just beginning to materialise. It was Bristol, Birmingham, Hull, and Manchester. Now when you think of creative writing and media studies and all that, it's a burgeoning academic area that you just never had before. Of course I had to get 3 As to get into any of those universities and I managed to get an A, a B and an F. I failed my French so spectacularly that I went into the clearing process and ended up doing a very old fashioned English degree at Leicester University. So I knew lots of Anglo Saxon! But, of course, like lots of students I acted all the time and the Sunday Times Student Drama Festivals were a godsend because you could get spotted there and get offers of work.

Working as an actor
I started work the day after my finals. I got offered a job in rep - the full term is repertory and it means that you work for the theatre and perform in a number of plays - for the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. I suppose I worked in that for most of my 20s and in community theatre and theatre in education. The 70s was the time when alternative ‘fringe’ theatre was suddenly flowering.

All of the theatres had a theatre in education team attached to them and you’d be doing things like a lunchtime show, the show in the evening, maybe a show in the pub after that: any venue was possible. Theatre was suddenly not confined to this proscenium arch. The Young Vic was the best example of that which was the first custom built fringe theatre. The National Theatre was at the Old Vic and down the road was this butcher's shop front transformed into this theatre in the round. At the time, the idea of theatre in the round was shocking. Some people though ‘My gosh, how can you act?’ because of that age old rule of never turning your back on the audience and, of course, in the round you would have your back to some of the audience. There was a whole variety of ways to act and places to act in.

Acting in Shakespeare's plays
I think when I was younger I found acting in all plays very similar. I didn’t notice the distinction between Shakespeare plays and other plays that I seem to be noticing now. Modern naturalistic plays seem so easy in comparison to what I’m rehearsing at the moment, but it maybe because I haven’t worked on a Shakespeare play that's as late as this and it may be because the language is so complicated and holding such complicated ideas. I’ve played Lady Macbeth twice and Gertrude in Hamlet and they seemed very straight forward to me, so did Tennessee Williams, so did Arthur Miller, huge sets of feelings but relatively straight forward. What is interesting about Coriolanus is that it is working on a political, emotional, psychological level.

Giles Block, the wonderful text director here, said to me ‘if you get the ideas right the verse will follow’ and then he said ‘Volumnia probably has a120 brilliant ideas. That's what her part is, and they’re all packaged up in a very particular set of words. You just have to get those 120 ideas in your head and you’ll speak the verse clearly and compellingly.’ Which is true but the ideas aren’t straight forward. She has the most complicated relationship with her son that means that six or seven things are going on in your head at any one time as you are saying the lines. So the short answer is yes I’m finding it very different and much more taxing this time doing Shakespeare than I have found doing contemporary or at least 20th century drama.

Bulletin 2

Preparing for the role of Volumnia
I had a couple of sessions with Dominic, the director, one to one just reading through the play together, which was very helpful to go through the play to get the sense. In doing that we just shared ideas about it. Other than reading the play and just letting it sift around in my head, I didn’t really do much preparation.

There are so many brilliant books about Shakespeare, I’m reading Peter Ackroyd's biography at the moment but I’ve still got Stephen Greenblatt's and Richard Wilson's to read too! I like to know about the time when Shakespeare was writing what was going on in his life and what his feelings might potentially have been. It's all speculation around this area, but the fact that there were corn riots in Stratford (and probably the whole of the Midlands) at this time and the fact that his mother died in 1608. It doesn’t mean anything except to me as little thoughts that will just flutter around in my mind and make me think and wonder about why he's writing about this extraordinarily damaged relationship that seems very, very strange to me.

But above and beyond that, I don’t know how to prepare for a part other than doing it. I was saying to Dominic yesterday that I just have to find out what's happening in each scene and in a way the doing of it unlocks what it is. The minute you kneel down or touch somebody or say words to them looking at their face and you engage and you see how your words and actions affects them, it all becomes a lot clearer than reading psychotherapeutic works about the narcissistic Oedipal relationship between Volumnia and Coriolanus.

First impressions of Volumnia
I think that Volumnia is a damaged person herself. In the first half of the play you see her as cut off from suffering and she has no imaginative grasp of what it's like to be other people, she has no empathy at all which has been a great quality for her in surviving as a woman in this society. She has raised her son to be a warrior and certainly if you’re a soldier and if you’re the mother there is no point instilling empathy in your child because you’ve raised a killing machine, essentially, and not somebody who goes around imagining what it's like to be the widow of the man you’ve killed. That's no good, she doesn’t have that in her.

But of course if you split yourself off from feeling in that way there will be consequences and we see that in the play later. Actually, she's so recognisable to me in the scariest way. There are so many appalling mothers and appalling parents around in the world who infantilise their children - love them, adore them, but there's an icy withdrawal if the child doesn’t do what the mother wants. They’re always raising the bar higher. I’m thinking of a family I knew when I was younger: you pass your school exams, you get into school and then you have to be head boy, you have to get into university, you have to be head of the students union - the bar is always raised and the child is always straining for approval and to please the parents. The love is always conditional. It's probably all quite subconscious but that's what happens, I think, with her to Coriolanus so there's huge emotional manipulation of that child going on, which in a modern sense we’d call abusive I suppose.

Volumnia and Coriolanus
What's hard with all abused children is that you can’t be objective about your parents because you haven’t got any other ones to compare them with. You’re born into it, you know it and you love that person and you want to please them. Hopefully by the time most people are teenagers they manage to separate out safely and healthily from the appalling and the nice parents. I’m a nice parent of course! In fact my youngest is 16 and he's right in the middle of that, hopefully, healthy separation, because they’ve got to survive on their own because you won’t be there one day. That hasn’t happened with Coriolanus. He has no means of separating out into some healing, nurturing way of being loved. I’m sure he's tried to establish that with his wife, Virgilia, but it's very hard. I was thinking the other day of people who damage themselves rather than damage the mother or the parent. Maybe in a slow way with alcoholics, people like Oliver Reed and other actors and people I know. People who’ve been sent away to public school when they were seven years old or something and they’ve had to cope, had to be brave, had to survive. I’d say that's our modern day equivalent.

Nurturing is a very rich area for discussion because we’ve all been children and some of us are mothers and its funny when you are a parent you don’t know how to be a parent except as how you were parented. That's why things are carried on. It's interesting that there is a little grandson in Coriolanus who has obviously been brought up in the same way. He's allowed to run after butterflies and tear them to pieces with his teeth and that's thought to be funny. You have to say obviously at an early stage he's not being given an empathetic grasp about what it's like to be another living creature. They’re cutting him off to it and the cycle gets repeated. I think Coriolanus is infantilised by his mother. He's kept as this boy. The word ‘boy’ crops up so many times in the text and the thing that tips him over I think is when Aufidius says ‘Thou boy of tears’. You can see this hurt, furious child in the playground who's always, always got to prove they can fight but of course it gets exhausting.

Bulletin 3

Rehearsals this week
We’ve been working through from the top of the play. Yesterday we were doing the first scene which is Virgilia and Volumnia and then Valeria comes in and they go off the greet Coriolanus. There are the ‘girly’ scenes and then the men were all having fight calls yesterday. It's so nice that we’re not in those because we can have time to go off and look at our lines whilst the boys go off and do roaring around and waving swords and shouting.

Today we are looking at the big scene with Coriolanus where he comes back from having blown it with the tribunes and the people. He comes back and Volumnia gives him a lesson on how to be a strategic, political sort of person. She gives him a sort of lesson in media presentation really, instructing him to go and behave in a certain way to achieve your ends even if you don’t believe it. It's really how to put a ‘spin’ on things or to lie really.

Learning Lines
I would say I have learnt my lines now. They’re sort of floating like silt on a pond, they’re just there and I know them but they’re not completely sunk into my blood yet. I do actually know the sense of them. Sometimes I paraphrase and say the wrong word but the sense is right, so obviously they’re seeping in. It used to be so easy to learn lines when I was younger and I was talking about this with the younger girls playing Virgilia and Valeria. It used to be that you could just sort of get it by osmosis. You just read and performed the scene a lot and it would just soak into you from off the page. But now, it really is learning by rote.

There's a lot to learn with Volumnia, not just exchanges but also speeches where you are generating your own next thought. You’re not just saying your line because someone else has just said something that engages you - you are making it up as you go along and I have really had to learn that off by heart in a quite old-fashioned way by moving my hand down the page to memorise five lines in at a time. It is quite hard andI’m surprised at how hard it is. I haven’t got a technique except enormous struggle and the fear and terror of the thought of not knowing it- that motivates you!

Now that everyone knows their lines rehearsals are much better and easier because we’re actually doing it, no matter how tentative or scary or how awful it sounds when we open our mouths. You might have all sorts of ideas in your head, and reading it before will have revealed things, but actually doing it and looking at the person and saying the lines properly to them and getting a reaction reveals much more about how to do it than talking about it ever could.

Forgetting lines on stage
I have forgotten my lines on stage before, but not for a while. It's such a truly awful thought, you get a sort of curtain come across your brain and you just can’t remember. You don’t know you’re going to dry but the next thought just isn’t there and you either jump ahead or burble around it until you get it back on track. It is one of the most unpleasant feelings and I think everybody, not just actors, has those anxiety dreams where they’re on stage and they don’t know the lines and you’re always trying to explain to people. A classic actors’ dream is being pushed on stage and nobody will listen to you when you keep turning round and saying ‘I don’t know this part’ and they keep saying ‘ It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, you’ll be all right’. It really is such a familiar dream for so many actors but I think we all have those. It is such a deep, deep anxiety that we all have that dream in common.

Best moment of rehearsals so far
At the moment I’m enjoying very much working with Giles Block on the text, finding out about the verse and which words to emphasise. In terms of placing a stress, sometimes he can give you help with the beat. For example, I have a line where I say ‘For how can we? Alas, how can we for our country pray?’ and he will said I could try stressing the how and the we the first time.’ So it will be ‘For how can we? Alas, how can we for our country pray?’ Something like that lifts the line and helps to it to make sense. So I’ve enjoyed that, but maybe that's also because those sessions take place out of the pressure of rehearsals so maybe it feels safer at the moment. I’ll let you know as things go on.

Difficulties
I find it difficult when I think of the sheer size of the part. By that I mean the emotional size of what's got to happen. The nature of the task is getting clearer to me and I suppose you have to have a self confidence or a self belief that you can fulfil that. That is a constant source of anxiety and worry until you’ve moved into the part and the words are fluent and you’re doing it - then you’ll find out if you can or can’t! At the moment it's not clear because you’re not able to go at it full pelt. So that would be an area of anxiety at the moment.

Being aware and alert on stage
There are in fact at least six or seven conscious thoughts going on in your head when you’re on stage. Firstly, you are operating the thoughts of the character. If I was saying as Volumnia ‘Nay go not from us thus, if it was so that our request then our request did tend to save the Romans thereby to destroy the Volscians” then you’re grappling with a complicated line about the deal Coriolanus could do. At the same time you would also be aware where you are facing – are you facing the actor? Can the audience see? Are you going to tread on the hem of your dress if you stepped backwards? If you stepped backwards, would you go into Virgilia and the little boy? What's that person in the crowd doing and are they concentrating? Is that member of the audience laughing? You have a lot of thoughts and a lot of awareness going on. You’ve got a scanner going on the whole time, monitoring the performance while you’re doing it because you’re thinking ‘Oh that didn’t get a laugh and it usually gets a laugh - I wonder what I did’ and ‘Oh I must lift this a bit’. It's strange there's a lot going on even if it's the slightest exchange.

Being on stage is about getting the balance of the right thoughts, the right awareness and actually being relaxed on stage and concentrated at the same time. It's a funny state. You have to be very, very focussed and absolutely relaxed all at the same time. You can’t go on concentrating and concentrating; tension is no good. It's helpful to think about your objective. For example in the last scene, when Volumnia is trying to get Coriolanus to change his mind, it's that kind of focus that that will carry you through those two long speeches by focussing on the objective of stopping Coriolanus invading Rome. There are so many different ways of trying to persuade him but that's the single intent. It's a mixture of things that you say and things that you do.

Bulletin 4

Volumnia and Virgilia's relationship
The marriage of Coriolanus and Virgilia seems to be an arranged marriage in many ways and poor Virgilia is stuck in Volumnia's household. There's obviously enormous irritation and clearly Volumnia is the most ghastly, overbearing mother in law and a very oppressive woman, but as the play progresses there are points of unity between them. Once Coriolanus is exiled they unite in their anger at the tribunes, the people who led his expulsion, and they unite in pulling the women and Coriolanus’ son together to go and plead for the safety of Rome. I think they recognise their mutual dependence by the end, there's an alliance out of what is in fact two women who have the most opposite points of view.

At the beginning, Virgilia is clearly missing her husband and is sad that he's in the war. Volumnia gives her a little lecture demonstration in that first scene basically saying ‘You’re crazy! This is good. It's good to go to war and kill lots of people. That's what your husband is about, it's a great and honourable thing to do. Wounding people is what he was put on the earth for, it's great!’ However, both of the characters have shifts in their opinions during the play and Volumnia certainly isn’t that woman by the end of the play. She is somebody who's trying to stop bloodshed, which is interesting. Volumnia and Virgillia are temperamentally very different and it's a relationship that changes and develops throughout the play.

Costumes
I’ve had a costume fitting and it's lovely! My dress is all grey, but it's made up of different shades of grey or white. It's so detailed and so elaborate because it is based on a proper Elizabethan costume with the corseted top, the full skirt with pleats and slashes, separate sleeves and a very stiff corset so I hope it will be OK for breathing. There is such a high level of detail - the different kinds of braiding that's even on the bodice or around the cuff, the different kind of muslin around the neck - is all so wonderful.

My outfit is being made from scratch. It's all from a pattern that's pinned on you. It's made up on you and cut from material - not just a dress that's being adjusted to fit you. I think there is going to be some toga like piece of material over my dress as well to denote the Roman connection. Actually having put on the costume I thought I would be weighed down with another huge sheet of material on top!

I have another costume for the last scene of the play when we go to plead for Rome not to be invaded. That's a sort of wrecked version of what we’ve been wearing. I don’t quite know what it is but I’m sure there’ll be another fitting soon.

The finish on all the costumes here is amazing. I know that it is a speciality of the house here that they pride themselves on, as with all the props and stuff like the armour. It's all real armour - there is an armourer! Brian, the stage manager, was saying how disastrous it was when this bloke made a breast plate for an actor last season and it didn’t fit him, and if you can’t move your arms properly in it you can’t fight properly. He does make it tailored to fit you, it's even more precise than a corset! I think designers working at the Globe are restricted in what they can do with the set so maybe they want to make a difference with the other aspects of the design, like the costumes.

Technical Rehearsals
A technical rehearsal is really the move out of the rehearsal space to the space where you are actually going to give the performance. It's absolutely for real; the only people missing are the audience. You come on in real time, in the real space, with the real props and you are in full costume. So unless you have had the presence of mind to work in rehearsal skirts previously, you’ll be moving out of your jeans into full blown Elizabethan skirts, with maybe a wig and make-up. You are physically becoming your character.

The play has had its own sort of inner life in the rehearsal room and now we are moving out into this extraordinary space that is the Globe theatre and it's just amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like it before. So the technical rehearsal is about how you physically put the thing together.

The changes that have been made are really just practical things, such as having to stand in a different place when you say a particular line because another character can’t be seen. And of course the music - which is live music here, which is wonderful - is added on top which affects the speed of things.

Bulletin 5

Getting into costume
I always want to be at the theatre an hour and a half before a show goes up. It just gives me settling in time. I go to my dressing room and put the rollers in my hair. For an evening performance, at about 6.40 I take the rollers out and go to the hair and wig person who does my hair and puts an extra hairpiece in. At 6.55 my dresser comes to put me into my costume which involves several layers and needs to be tied at the back. And then I’m ready!

First Night nerves

This was one of the few first nights when it was as scary as I imagined it would be! It was a shock. Nothing had prepared me; no warnings or information or kindly counselling about what the sheer press of people would be like when we came out in our first little scene, sewing away. It's so high all around you, it's like an opera house, and it's so far behind you and so near…I’ve worked for thirty six years in theatre, I’ve played in the round and I’ve worked at the Theatre Royal Haymarket -which is a massive barn of a place - tons of west end theatres, tons of schools and pubs and village halls…the Globe is like all of those in one! It is the most extraordinary space. The audience are wonderfully near and intimate. It's like when you dive into the sea the first time; you want to go swimming, but it does knock your breath away. You just gulp. Your senses are overwhelmed by the press of people who are just so present, bombarding you with information of how to do it, that you can barely pull back into your own inner concentration. It's such an overwhelming sensation to be out there on that stage, and the audience were very much running the show tonight that night. They were dictating it because of their great energy and it gave a great happiness to play it. I suppose there has been a better balance the nights since, when we have perhaps been in better control of our material, and more interactive with the audience, rather than just weeping with relief because people laughed. You get so desperate and pathetic about that on first night.

Unpredictable laughter
On the first night, there were lots of laughs that came where we hadn’t thought of it and that felt very affirmative and good. It's such a vocally affirming reaction. It doesn’t necessarily mean it's the right one, or the one you were trying to get. If the audience was a classroom of kids, you would be saying at those points ‘oh we’re going to have to drop them down deeper into this’, or observing that they’re enjoying skimming around on top of things and they are having a lot of fun. But we know they are here for other things; the audience is here to understand the play and to have their hearts and minds moved, to be fully engaged in a deeper way - we hope - by the time they leave.

The physical experience of being at the Globe is a fundamental part of the experience but if that is all you get out of it, you might as well go to the circus, or go and watch a fire-eater, or - as Shakespeare was in competition with - a bear or cock fight; the exciting aspects is due to its being at a live event. But there is a balance or a relationship to be struck, I think, whereby we have to learn how to play that space so that we engage every aspect of the audience; all their fears and hopes and happiness and try to take responsibility for the meaning of the play. And that has an impact, too, on how we should play this very hard space.

Weather and the audience
Weather does literally affect the acoustics, whether it sharpens them up or not. It's very hard I think when everyone has their rainproof clothing on because of the noise of the rain hitting the plastic. It's also more subdued when it's raining, obviously because they are wet, but in my opinion they also can’t quite hear if they have hoods up. It's just a different dynamic. It's not better or worse, but probably not as easy or as comfortable because concentration is bound to be a little bit decreased. But then, as everybody says brightly, that is just part of coming to The Globe. That's what you experience. We opened on a very sunny Friday, but then the next Saturday it rained pretty much all the way through. But the slightly damp, grey weather on the Sunday was actually pretty good, because we don’t get too hot wandering around in the costumes in that weather. And I think the audience, when the sun is beating down, probably find it quite hard to stand for three hours.

Doing the jig
The jig is great if you can dance! Unfortunately, I’m the worst person at the jig. But having said that, it's a relief to do it. It's such lovely music and, most importantly, it's the end! You know you’ve survived! Happiness all round. But I am so bad. And it's not that I can’t dance; I can’t even clap. I just can’t remember the sequence of movements. It's absolutely lovely to do, and a happy, affirming thing to do, and clearly the audience like it. I’m just glad I made the wise decision to be an actor, not a dancer, because I am so bad.

Did they do the jig in Shakespeare's time?
Yes. They also did a parade at the beginning, where all the actors came out and paraded to music to begin the play. Brecht would have been proud of them as I suppose it's an earlier form of ‘alienation’. The actors come out and in effect say ‘We’re the actors, you are the audience, you all know why we are here, we look like this, and we’re going to do a show for you.’ And at the end, the dance is an acknowledgment that we have all been in this space, and going through this experience for three hours. You’ve been watching, we’ve been performing; it was a play and Coriolanus isn’t really dead. Thank you!

It's a funny thing to do with the suspension of disbelief, which I think Brecht would like. He would always use devices such as ‘breaking out ‘of a play, to say something or to remind the audience that they are watching. I don’t know why, especially, because unless you are six years old and lost in a pantomime, I’m not sure people do lose themselves in the play, other than for the right reasons, other than feeling a sense of emotional identity with the characters. You still believe it's truthful. I don’t think it needs to be real. You can’t just tell people things. The ideas in Coriolanus are essentially so complicated that they could be quite boring to get over to people. To put them in a play, in a pretend story about politics and families and violence, it's a fiction whereby the truth can be revealed.

Bulletin 6

Performing in a long run
You hope for each performance to be newly coined or invented every time, for the performance to be all about the other actors and how they are playing it, and your reactions and how you interact with them. You shouldn’t think, “Oh, I did it like this the last time and it worked so I’ll just do that again” because that is always deathly. Playing your ‘best’ bits or your ‘effective’ bits and thinking, “I used to get upset there, I’ll do that again” is always tempting, but always deadly. Some nights you have to do that because you can’t find a way to ‘hack’ your way back into the emotional centre of the play.

During one performance, I had a really hard time getting into the play and I actually didn’t really get into the part until Volumnia's last, long scene. I was sat there feeling tense and miserable before going on, and it was just spitting with rain, and it just wet my ears with little drops of rain and one rain drop filled up the little cup of my ear which made me remember when I was expecting my first baby which was a little boy, and I lay on my back as you do in an examination and the nurse said, ‘Do you want to hear the baby's heartbeat?’ I had no idea you could do this, but said yes, not actually having any idea what that would be like. So she put the stethoscope in my ear and the end on my tummy and I heard this very fast and high beep, beep, beep, beep…it was like having a little sub-mariner in there or something! I was so astounded. I didn’t even know I was moved but I must have immediately sprung tears, because they sprung out of the corners of my eyes and ran down the sides of my face and filled up my ears and then spilled out of my ears because there were so many! And when I put my head up, sitting outside there in the dark, before going on to talk to Coriolanus, I must have triggered off a memory or an image in my head of that moment which was so useful. That revived a set of intense feelings and images about my little baby-boy-to-be. It helped me to open myself up to my pretend son on stage.

You have to stay open to those things coming at you. Maybe you’ll have read something in the paper and it will make you look at the play again. But you have to keep on turning it over so that you don’t do some sort of ‘karaoke’ acting. It is quite hard to do. You bore yourself. It's about how to be fully present, how to be really, really there and not just acting. It's funny because acting is what you do, but you need to stay with it. Just repeating; that is what makes audiences go to sleep and say that Shakespeare is boring. If everyone is only half there then you are all united in this thing which has absolutely no point and you might as well have all stayed at home rather than travel in all this way to ‘recite’ bits of dead blank verse.

Reviews
I do read reviews, not because I wish to do so but because I would rather know what is out there for good or bad. It's rather like when you have the test and the doctor knows whether it is a boy or a girl and you can choose to know or not, and some people decide not to know. And I thought why? Why should all these doctors and nurses know whether I’m having a boy or a girl and I’ve decided not to? So I would always want to know what was said, even though I know how absolutely barking it is, from responses to other productions I have been in, I know how wide of the market it is, but it still unfortunately has most of us by the throat because it will form the public perception of what you are doing whether it is good or bad. So we are all in thrall to it.

I’m not sure whether reviews affect my performance. I think a very bad review would affect my confidence a great deal. I think the reviews have been mainly positive. I think they can have a very bad affect. Sometimes they can have a settling effect; I think the actors in Titus Andronicus are feeling massive relief and happiness because they have had such an endorsement from the papers. So reviews can have a positive effect but they can also be one of the more destructive aspects of the work.

Each review is only a perception, but it is a very significant perception that is going to hold more weight than Joe Bloggs’ perception. People rightly, sweetly and sometimes misguidedly scan the papers to find out what's good. They actually think that they can trust some of these peculiar middle aged men who are theatre reviewers who are telling them what to think and where to go.

I think that audience contact is amazing, especially with this play the Globe, and it can tell you a lot about how the play is being received. The audience like it, they feel part of the event, more included in the event, and a little bit exposed. It's also good to have one's friends’ and family's reactions alongside the critical reviews because you need to test out reviews and compare and contrast. Often people lie about what they think about the actual theatre. I find that people think of Shakespeare as similar to going to church; ‘It's good to be bored’ or, ‘It's good for your soul’ and it is a ‘worthy’ thing to do, like going to the opera. It's as if because it's high culture then it must be good for you, even if it is completely incomprehensible twaddle. I think most people's experience of theatre when they are teenagers is mind-numbingly boring stuff and it often takes a particular production to wake them up to what theatre can be.


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